Director General of the GSMA, Anne Bouverot, stressed the importance of ‘transparency’ in dealing with staff involved in merged companies when she addressed MBA students in her Cambridge Leadership Seminar. GSMA is the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association – an alliance of mobile operators and related companies.
Managing through periods of growth and decline, meeting new competitive threats and challenges and handling staff through mergers were key elements of her ‘Leading in Dynamic Markets’ lecture.
I think transparency is paramount especially when you're going through change, through difficult and painful change. People will always think, am I being treated fairly? Am I getting all the information? Is somebody hiding something from me?
Ms Bouverot, a telecommunications industry veteran, used examples from her own career to demonstrate how leading organisations are addressing today’s challenging telecommunications market.
In an interview for Cambridge Judge Business School’s website she talked about the importance of being ‘open to luck’ and taking the unexpected opportunity. She stressed the need to be ambitious and to dream scary dreams, quoting Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, who said the size of dreams must “always exceed your current capacity to achieve them. If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”